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Come January, all sorts of rent-seeking and lobbies start, demanding tax sops and other concessions in the General Budget. But the voice of underprivileged and poor, particularly farmers, who have been hit by an unprecedented crisis, is hardly heard as it is very feeble.

State Assembly elections to three north-eastern States – Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland – will be held next month. Tripura goes to polls on February 18, while Meghalaya and Nagaland on February 27. The results will be out on March 3. In the last five years the political scenario in the north-east has changed a lot, with the Congress declining and the BJP emerging as a major political player. In Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, the BJP is in power while in Nagaland it was, until recently, a coalition partner of the ruling Naga People’s Front (NPF), The Congress is in power only in tiny Mizoram where the old warhorse, Lalthanhawla, still holds his flock together.

Even as the gau rakshaks have yielded place in the media headlines to the Karni Sena, the latter’s crusade against the screening of the Sanjay Leela Bhansali film, Padmavat, is giving a foretaste of what can be expected if and when India’s present constitutional order is replaced – God forbid! – by Hindu Rashtra.

Media persons witnessed 114 attacks against them across the country during the last three calendar years of 2014, 2015 and 2016 by the vested interests for fear of being exposed of their nexus with political-bureaucratic-builder class in power, corporate, bigots, extremists, militants and others by their reporting as watchdog of public interests, according to the latest data available in the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). During the period, cases registered against such attacks were under Sections 325, 326, 326A and 326B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). However, no separate data is available on journalists killed, as is learnt from the MHA.

NEW DELHI: The Communist Party of India has strongly condemned the unilateral and hurried move of the Election Commission to recommend the disqualification of 20 AAP MLAs for holding ‘office of profit’. The Commission did not bother to hear the AAP leaders on the issue.

The audit of global freedom, the latest report of Freedom House, an independent think-tank that rates free countries and not-free countries, is out and India remains in the ‘free’ category, while China and Russia are not worth the thought much less the description. None of the Gulf countries, not even the UAE, which gives a truly high standard of living to its residents, is ‘free’. Saudi Arabia is an out-and-out monarchy and Crown Prince Salman is a mixture of progressive and regressive. Zimbabwe now has a chance because Robert Mugabe no longer remains at the helm. Most of the rest of Africa remains in the dark zone.

With what face was Prime Minister Narendra Modi preparing to stand up and deliver his plenary address to the World Economic Forum on January 23, 2018 knowing that, only the other day, anti-poverty charity Oxfam had in its report indicted his government of having failed miserably to make a dent on poverty in India? Back of his mind, did it even lurk that one per cent of India’s 125 crore Indians had cornered 73 per cent of the national income generated in 2017?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to India has of course helped India and Israel to normalise their bilateral ties, but more than that it has facilitated Netanyahu to buttress his image back in his country. It is significant that Netanyahu chose to visit India when Israeli people had hit the streets of Tel Aviv demanding his ouster.

It is a matter of concern that economic inequality is far exceeding the economic growth rate in India. The growing income disparity, alongside the massive promotion of consumerism, is driving the deprived more to crimes as the latest report of the union government’s National Crime Records Bureau would suggest. The increasing rich-poor divide poses a big challenge to the country’s social and public policy formulation and implementation. Not only does it throw a challenge to public policy—particularly in terms of figuring out wealth redistribution trend — but, over a period, it could potentially trigger a social unrest in some of the states where the rich-poor divide is too wide. It may be time that organisations such as NITI Aayog or the National Council of Applied Economic Research undertakes a proper study on the growing economic inequality and income disparity in India.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Communist Party of India (Marxist) Central Committee’s resolution ruling out any form of electoral understanding or adjustments with the Congress is a political blunder more serious than the one the party committed in 1996.